Seven co-authors and I wrote eight stories about our relationships with our Fathers. Annie Hart gathered us all, physically in her place in Hebden Bridge and virtually online, to put together a book to honour that half of us – Fathers: fabulous, absent, distant and single parent ones.

Read about:

How one Father survived a Japanese POW camp during WWII

How another Father battered the Mother of his eight kids

How a Father raised his Daughter on his own and then left for another continent

How a Father had only six conversations with his Daughter in all his life

How a Father considered his life a quiet despair

How a Father dealt with his European daughter converting to Islam

How a Father conceived his Daughter against all odds

How a Father ordered chips from his Daughter without recognising her

Jude Fowler reads her story

Annie Hart presents the book to the audience at Thackeray’s Book store in Denton

Free Writing 13 December 2010

Free wiring. Writing free. Free as a wind in front of which no one built a wall the height of the whole earth’s atmosphere or stuck it into the aerodynamic tunnel and forced to swirl around in order to test some new car that no one would be able to buy, but some people would be able to rent in order to able to race around race tracks on Saturdays. And Sundays. And after work. All the time when they are not in work, in fact. Anything to avoid seeing their wives and children. If only they knew that their wives and children would do anything in order to avoid seeing them. And their children and their mothers respectively. The problem is women and children have fewer opportunities to earn free time in this world. Unless wives prostitute themselves to their husbands’ business associates, and their children become the stars of the new Harry Potter-like franchise.

Otherwise, the weak of the this world are locked into their kitchens, their lounges, their schools, their schools yards, their backyards, their community college rooms, their knitting and reading groups. Forever cold, forever dark, forever having to be with people they don’t like but lean towards in order to borrow some warmth. In order to remember how to speak. In order to stop themselves crashing their heads in their television sets. While their respective Fathers and husbands gain one lap after another on a racetrack in the moonlight, their car that no one can afford forcing the wind around it in unthinkable trajectories.